The Emergency Community Development Project (PUDC) is a Regional Bureau for Africa Flagship project which aims to reduce poverty and growing inequalities between regions by providing rural communities with basic socioeconomic infrastructure including in some cases health and education facilities. Additionally, the PUDC supports both central and local governments as well as communities to build their systems and capacities in development planning and procurement. The first PUDC started in Senegal where UNDP delivered over USD 200 million in a three-year period followed by Togo in 2016 which is currently ongoing. While the PUDC did provide impactful results on the ground, UNDP Country offices faced several issues related to risk management, operations, audit and resource mobilization. With several countries in West and central Africa signaling interest in discussing with UNDP a PUDC like model (i.e. Chad, Burkina Faso, etc.).

The specific objectives of the PUDC are to:

Improve the populations' access to infrastructure and basic socio-economic facilities (rural roads; hydraulics; energy and agricultural production and processing equipment);

Strengthen the capacities of professional groups and local actors in rural entrepreneurship, leadership and contracting/project management, and community management;

Promote entrepreneurship, improve the productivity of the rural populations and develop agricultural production through access to production and processing techniques and the facilitation of access to financial services;

Reinforce the local governance systems and processes towards a sustainable local economic development;

Develop and set up a geo-referenced monitoring-appraisal-coordination system capable of providing information on the project's progress and used to steer the social policy of the Government.